The end of the year is approaching and the news columns and web sites of a hungry nation are filling up with weird Florida stories, each supposedly an illustration of the character, lifestyle and unholy preoccupations of our strange, strange state.

WEIRD RIDE: She rode a manatee at a Pinellas County beach, got arrested and became a weird Florida story.

Florida has always been a strange state to people who don’t live here. But the strange used to be charming, at least when Miami novelist Karen Russell was growing up. In a recent interview with NPR's "On the Media," she remembered her school field trips to the Miami Science Museum.

"They had these wilderness areas," she said. "You’d go outside and you could see spiders and lizards and snakes, and it was always completely unclear what was part of the exhibit and what was just chilling on a trash can. I'd be, like, 'Is that tarantula the exhibit? Of just kind of around?'"

That passed for weird back then.

On the same show, Will Greenlee, a crime writer who blogs the weird stuff for Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers, said strange stories that might go unnoticed elsewhere are easy to find in Florida.

"I think a lot of it is due to the open records laws in Florida," Greenlee said. "They are very liberal. It's very easy to get arrest affidavits and police reports."

There will be another list next year, unless the weirdness profile of some other state rises to obscure ours, as ours did to California over the years.